


Read My Misfortune

by ERNest



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Education, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Prison, Reading
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:08:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22245343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ERNest/pseuds/ERNest
Summary: An inspector, a convict, a servant, and how they learned to read.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 22





	Read My Misfortune

This son of a convict is not himself a convict, yet he dimly perceives how small a step it would take to fall and follow in those fatal footsteps. The only way Javert can be certain that he will not become the thing he hates is to become its opposite.

If he wishes to uphold the law he must be able to read it, and if he wishes to read the law he must learn to read. So he teaches himself using a handbook he wheedles out of a guard, and years later *as* a guard he teaches himself to love the writing out of incident reports. No one else seems to care for that part of the job, though it is nothing more nor less than a straight line laying out the facts of the matter with no room for interpretation

When the day’s work is completed, he takes his solitary walk home, where he opens a book or a newspaper and begins to read. Most stories venture too close to the fantastical for his sensibilities; even news items have a flavor of gossip to them, if only to entice its potential customers.

He can’t stand the nightly task he’s set for himself, most nights, but this is what civilized men do. He is barred from society, first by his birth and then by his chosen profession, but he can prowl around its edges as a constant guard and look in through bars of ink to keep it safe.

*

The man had a name once but he lost it when he stole a loaf of bread and became a criminal, just as he lost the family for whom he did the theft. In his haze of misery and dull denial he forgot to even think of them. When he next got a glimpse of what had become of them it was purely by accident and the news itself was dismal. Several months after he learned of their early mornings and late nights, of the cold and the heat, his turn to escape arose and he took it without question or hesitation.

Perhaps he had some idea of making his way to Paris to find his sister and the one child she had left. Or by that single glimmer of light he had watched his last bit of hope flicker and die, so he had nothing to keep him from acting in reckless desperation. Or, with the end of his sentence fast approaching he had freedom on his mind and had to take it instead of it being given him. At the moment of opportunity he didn’t care that being caught would push freedom further away. His few hours of liberty, if it could be called such, added another four years until liberty would be his and solidified his resentment of society.

At the age of forty a convict learned to read for the first time. Light enlightens and as he sat hunched over the table set up by the Ignorantine Friars, each letter seemed a flame. But the discovery of words brought him no joy, and their light cast strange shadows. The convict burned with hate, not only for his own unhappy fate, but for the people who had created it for him, and for the groups they found, and in the forming excluded him. And now he had the words and logic to channel and describe so much rage.

*

The servant girl abandoned by her mother does not need to read to do any of her tasks, so no one ever bothers to teach her. She can clean floors and carry water without it, or make and repair stockings without it.

Where she cannot read letters, Cosette can read the onset of fury in the furrows of Madame Thenardier’s forehead, and impatience and danger in a raised poker. She reads monsters into the shadows of Montfermeil’s forest, because something must account for the terror she feels at night.

Does she dream of escape? She does not even deem it a possibility! There is no idea of a different life she could be living; this is all she can remember having known. By now she understands that there is little point to deciphering the details of her misery, and she simply lives it now.


End file.
